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Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
- mplanchard 21d agohttps://archive.is/pdKjA https://archive.is/pdKjA
- mplanchard 21d agoThe newsworthy thing here, IMO, is that they don’t even seem to be checking images against the NCMEC database > The U.S. national center shares digital fingerprints with major technology companies so they can scan and remove the imagery. The center’s list is used by Google and Meta, among others. About a third of the images found by The Times were from that list.
- mitxela 21d agoNCMEC won't share that database with almost anyone. I wouldn't be surprised if they denied it to Elon.
- londons_explore 21d agoIt also has a fairly high false positive rate, and due to the nature of the content paying someone to verify false positives is near impossible both legally and morally.
- mr_woozy 21d agoI worked for a startup almost a decade ago that automated this process entirely (reducing the need for human oversight / comparing). It worked, no one wanted to pay for it. Or were completely locked into Microsoft or other large companies solutions that half worked.
- dragonwriter 21d ago“We can’t fight child porn on our platform because it is less moral to run a scanner that may produce false positives and either accept that this may result in blocking some content that isn’t child porn OR pay someone to look at content and verify whether or not it is child porn, so instead we just do the far more moral thing of allowing and profiting from the distribution of child porn" is an interesting, if not exactly convincing, argument.
- londons_explore 21d agoIn quite a few countries, a false positive can lead to someone getting put in prison, entirely without any human viewing said image. It's all a matter of 'the image hash was on the database, therefore OP is guilty. 10 years incarceration'. I wouldn't want to be enabling such a system.
- dragonwriter 21d ago> In quite a few countries, a false positive can lead to someone getting put in prison That can only happen if it is either (1) used by government, or (2) used by private entities in a process flow that includes reports to government. "There exist countries with criminal justice systems with weak enough standards of proof that a false positive on a scan alone would result in prison", even if 100% true, is not a justification for a firm not making efforts to block child porn distribution on its networks. (It is, OTOH, a justification for working to reform the criminal justice systems in those countries, but that is rather far from the topic here.)
- mitxela 21d agoIntentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime, but not catching it is not a crime. If you think it's stupid, lobby Congress to change the law.
- dragonwriter 21d ago> Intentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime The entire argument for why verification was even an issue is that the allegedly the scan is not sufficient reason to actually believe that something is child pornoography. But whether or reviewing such a report may or may not be a crime in some jurisdiction somewhere on Earth, the certainty that arguments like that would detract from the point is the reason that of the two (moral and legal) issues raised in the post I responded to, I only said that one of them was ridiculous, and it wasn't the legal one.
- rationalist 21d agoI'm surprised Twitter didn't implement it earlier (before it was bought and rebranded to X). Also, is The Times admitting they were in possession of the illegal pictures? Does Freedom of the Press protect against that?
- iAMkenough 21d agoI think they’re saying Elon is in possession of it, and they were able to verify it via file hashing compared against the national database. Are you suggesting the national database maintainers are in possession of illegal pictures and should also have their rights questioned?
- mitxela 21d agoThe national database maintainers are the only people allowed to have the pictures, for the purpose of maintaining the database.
- iAMkenough 20d agoThe only people? What about law enforcement?
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- mplanchard 21d agoFrom TFA: > The Times conducted its own scan for child sexual abuse material on X by writing an automated computer program that searched for related terms without displaying the images, which are illegal to view. Links to the images were sent to a Microsoft service that checked whether they were included on lists of known abusive material compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other child safety groups. Matches were verified by analysts at the Canadian Center for Child Protection.
- rationalist 21d ago
- mikeyouse 21d agoThey were using it in 2024.. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2024-01-31_-_testimony_-_yaccarino1.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2024-01-31_-_...
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- RockRobotRock 21d agoI just got access to the NCMEC's hashlists for my startup. It was fairly easy.
- mitxela 21d agoWhat did you say to them?
- RockRobotRock 20d agoI said that I ran a company that could benefit from having access to that list, and could benefit NCMEC by reporting when we stumbled upon content which shows up in the list. (It's content scanning software for the adult film industry)
- ath3nd 21d ago[dead]
- PeterStuer 21d agoI thought all maps moved to bluesky?
- rationalist 21d agoIt took me a bit to realize you mean "MAPs" (so-called "Minor Attracted Persons") and not cartographical instruments.
- r_lee 21d agoI don't think that "label" even applies if they're posting such content
- hightrix 21d agoIt shouldn't be a label at all. Pedofiles should be called as such, or worse.
- iAMkenough 21d agoAmericans give them the label “Commander in Chief”
- xkcd1963 19d agoThe guidelines specifically list name collisions as a tangential annoyance to skip "They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cyanydeez 21d agoSurely, X should be shut down by some act of god.
- bigyabai 21d agoFor the government to subsequently reopen it? There has never been a more blatant honeypot in the history of American social media.
- NDlurker 21d agoOff topic, but gore should be treated the same way legally
- NDlurker 21d agoI get downvoted whenever I bring this up but nobody has a good argument on why it should remain legal.
- ZpJuUuNaQ5 21d agoAnybody has a good argument why it should be illegal?
- throwaway85825 21d agoArguably the average person needs to be exposed to more gore lest they become dangerously detached from the real world. People who live in sanitized bubbles end up creating systems that kill far more people because they cannot see the results of their actions. China censors all violent crime, it's basically illegal to report on. How do you think that's working out?
- singleshot_ 21d agoWell, you probably haven’t asked anyone who knows. The government doesn’t have a compelling interest. Banning it wouldn’t be narrowly targeted.
- ticulatedspline 21d agoCan you provide a compelling argument for why it should be illegal?
- UltraSane 21d agoWhy? What about surgical videos?
- ShinyLeftPad 21d agoWhat about them?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 21d agoTwitter/X should be held liable.
- bigyabai 21d ago*taps the sign* Repealing Section 230 When You Disagree With It Creates An Even Bigger Incentive For Abuse
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- mulemisterX 21d agoThe only conclusion I can come to at this point is that it's a honeypot.
- kelseyfrog 21d agoPOSIWID.
- OroPla 21d agoCan someone explain why the goal is only to remove the images and not go after whoever posted them? You'd think the pool of posters would eventually shrink to zero.
- happymellon 21d ago> not go after whoever posted them? What makes you think they aren't?
- OroPla 21d agoBecause it's not mentioned anywhere who posted the images in the first place and which prison he or she is now living in. The complaint in the article is about not taking down the images faster than within an hour.
- mplanchard 21d agoThe point is more that these images should not be uploadable in the first place, since they are trivially validated against the national DB to be CSAM. And, from TFA: > The program The Times wrote reported the images to the authorities. The images were removed, but some had been viewed hundreds of times.
- gamblor956 21d agoNot surprising. Musk displayed uncommonly detailed knowledge of the Southeast Asian child sex trade in the aftermath of the Thai Cave Crisis. It's not a big stretch to allowing CSAM on his own social media network.